ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the topic of the discernment of good and evil through examining certain dimensions of, what the authors have chosen to call, the ‘religious self’. While a great many different academic perspectives on the self are available, what has been termed, a ‘folk-conception’, or ‘common-sense view’, of the self is still widely used. By relying on this folk-conception, most people are able to talk about the self, and to be understood by others, without much apparent difficulty. To believe that self-transformation is possible, one must also believe that the self can change. Yet some have wondered if the self can in fact change. Perhaps, as some philosophers have held, it is the self's immutability that makes it the same self over time. A potentially confusing ambiguity in our thinking about the self is generated if the authors fail to distinguish between the notion of the ‘self’ and the notion of the ‘self-concept’.
